It was a clearcut case of "better to ask forgiveness than permission." Lt Col Jack DeWitt, head of the Evans Signal Laboratory at Camp Evans in Wall, New Jersey, had dreamed of bouncing radar waves off the moon since long before World War II. Now the War was over. He had the team, he had the equipment, he had the expertise - and it was all about to be disbanded, its collective capability lost forever. In September, 1945, following the Japanese surrender, Col DeWitt made his decision: This opportunity was just too good to pass up. In the waning days of their wartime service, his men began to work feverishly on what they dubbed Project Diana. On January 10, 1946, their efforts were crowned with success, and a series of radar signals produced answering beeps exactly 2.6 seconds later.

And the crowd went wild! News of their accomplishment was trumpeted around the world in the press and on radio and television, then in its infancy. Parades were held to honor this new breed of scientist-hero. Many were excited by the glitz or stirred by patriotism. A smaller number, perhaps, grasped the full significance of the event - that this tiny handful of scientists had ushered in a new age, an age in which we were no longer bound in theory or in fact by the earth's atmosphere. The sky was no longer the limit.

You might think the Army would be delighted, but you would be wrong. Although they couldn't altogether suppress the public excitement surrounding the event, they downplayed it as much as they could, fearing it revealed too much about their electronic warfare capability. The Army has a long memory. When E. King Stodola, DeWitt's Chief Scientist on the project, wished to review the documentation he himself had generated in preparation for the 50th anniversary of the event, he was told his security clearance was insufficient to allow him access to that classified material - even though by then he was a senior administrator of Electronic Warfare (EW) at the Pentagon.

​What was so special about these men, and the team that was more than just the sum of its parts? What made them click? This Website represents an effort to capture what each man brought to the effort and the chemistry among them that enabled them to succeed where others had failed.